Reflections, notes and miscellaneous items about the application of information technology to the teaching and learning process. I'm solely responsible for the opinions and ideas here which do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (But I hope most do...)

Thursday, May 29, 2008

As many of you know, Stephen Downes creates and shares information about learning and technologies at a prolific rate. His newsletter has been one of the most useful sources of current news that I've received for years. He has built and used his own custom system for aggregating and publishing material, and now he's released it to the public as gRSShopper.

I'm not sure that I'll be installing it anytime soon, though anyone interested in writing or gathering content and sharing it in multiple modes (site, RSS, newsletter) might want to give this tool serious consideration.

Here's what Stephen wrote when announcing the code's availability:

OK, here it is: the release, under GPL, of my RSS aggregation and personal content management software, gRSShopper. This release is numbered 0.1 and readers should take into account this there is still a lot that could be added to the software. That said, it's the tool I use to run all my web sites (it supports multiple sites with the same installation). I have created a demonstration site where you can go in and play with the site administration tool. I will be adding some examples of the system's functionality over the weekend. The source code is available on SourceForge and also on the gRSShopper site. I don't expect massive numbers of downloads or WordPress-like popularity. Rather, I view it as one prong in my overall research effort, a demonstration, in code, of the concepts I talk about in writing. But I will help people who are trying to install it (within reason) and I will continue to develop and improve the software - and will welcome contributions.